Lucinda

CHAPTER XVII

REBELLION

THERE was the situation; for Godfrey was quick enough to see what had happened as soon as he had read Arsenio’s letter; he finished it, which was more than I had done, and so found more lies than I had. We discussed the situation far into the night, Godfrey still doing most of the talking. He had come to Paris to see me about it, to ask my advice or to put some question to me; but he had not really got the problem clear in his mind. On subsidiary points – or, perhaps, one should rather say, on what seemed such to him – his view was characteristic, and to me amusing. He thought that most of Nina’s anger was due to the fact that she had been “done” by Arsenio, that he had got her money for Lucinda and for himself on false pretenses; whereas Nina was really furious with Lucinda herself for not having consciously accepted her charity, and made comparatively little of friend Arsenio’s roguery. He was much more full of admiration of Lucinda for not minding being discovered carrying a bandbox – and for laughing at her encounter with Lady Dundrannan while she was doing it – than of appreciation of her indignation over the blue frock; he thought she made a great deal too much of that. “Since she didn’t know, what does it come to?” he asked. And he wasted no reprobation on Arsenio. He had known Arsenio for a rogue before – a rogue after his money, and willing to use his wife as a bait to catch it; that he now knew that Arsenio was more completely a rogue all round – towards Nina as well as towards him – was merely a bit of confirmatory evidence; he saw nothing in the fact that Arsenio had, after all, given Lucinda the blue frock, though he would have been quite safe – as safe, anyhow – if he had given her nothing. His whole analysis, so far as it appeared in disjointed observations, of the other parties to the affair, ran on lines of obvious shrewdness, and was baffled only where they appeared – as in Lucinda’s case – to diverge from the lines thus indicated. Lucinda was a puzzle. Why had she hidden herself from him? She could “have it out” with Valdez, if she wanted to, without doing that!

But he was not immensely perturbed at her temporary disappearance; he could find her, if he wanted to. “It’s only a matter of trouble and money, like anything else.” And if she were furious with Valdez, no harm in that! Rather the reverse! Thus he gradually approached his own position, and the questions which he was putting to himself, and had found so difficult that he had been impelled to come and talk them over. These really might be reduced to one, and a very old one, though also often a very big one; it may be variously conceived and described as that between prudence and passion, that between morality and love, that between will and emotion, between the head and the heart. For purposes of the present case it could be personified as being between Nina and Lucinda. As a gentleman, if as nothing more, he had been obliged to own up to his engagement to lunch with Lucinda and to stand by it. But that act settled nothing ultimately. The welcome of a returning Prodigal would await him at Villa San Carlo, though the feast might perhaps be rather too highly peppered with a lofty forgiveness; he was conscious of that feature in the case, but minded it less than I should have; Nina’s pupil was accustomed to her rebukes, and rather hardened against her chastisement. But if arms were open to him elsewhere – soft and seducing arms – what then? Was he to desert Nina?

Her and what she stood for? And really, in this situation, she stood for everything that had, up to now, governed his life. She stood (she would not have felt at all inadequate to the demand on her qualities) for prosperity, progress, propriety, and – as a climax – for piety itself. Godfrey had been religiously brought up (the figure of the white-haired Wesleyan Minister at Briarmount rose before my eyes) and was not ashamed to own that the principles thus inculcated had influenced his doings and were still a living force in him. I respected him for the avowal; it is not one that men are very ready to make where a woman is in question; it had been implicit in his reason for knowing nothing of women, given to me a long time ago – that he had not been able to afford to marry.

Piety was the highest impersonation which Nina was called upon to undertake. Was it the most powerful, the most compelling? There were so many others, whose images somehow blended into one great and imposing Figure – Regularity, with her cornucopia of worldly advantages, not necessarily lost (Godfrey was quite awake to that) by a secret dallying with her opposite, but thereby rendered insincere – that counted with him – uneasy, and perpetually precarious. He was a long-headed young man; he foresaw every chance against his passion – even the chance that, having first burnt up all he had or hoped for, it would itself become extinct. Then it was not true passion? I don’t know. It was strong enough. Lucinda impersonated too; impersonated things that are very powerful.

He spoke of her seldom and evasively. In the debate which he carried on with himself – only occasionally asking for an opinion from me – he generally indicated her under the description of “the other thing” – other (it was to be understood) from all that Nina represented. Taken like that, the description, if colorless, was at least comprehensive. And it did get Lucinda – bluntly, yet not altogether wrongly. He saw her as an ideal – the exact opposite of the ideal to which he had hitherto aspired, the ideal of regularity, wealth, eminence, reputation, power, thirty per cent., and so on (including, let us not forget, piety). So seen, she astonished him in herself, and astonished him more by the lure that she had for him. Only he distrusted the lure profoundly. In the end he could not understand it in himself. I do not blame him; I myself was considerably puzzled at finding it in him. To say that a man is in love is a summary, not an explanation. Jonathan Frost – old Lord Dundrannan – had been a romantic in his way; Nina too in hers, when she had sobbed in passion on the cliffs – or even now, when she cherished disturbing emotions about things and people whom she might, without loss of comfort or profit, have serenely disregarded. There was a thread of the romantic meandering through the more challenging patterns of the family fabric.

Half a dozen times I was on the point of flying into a rage with him – when he talked easily of “buying Valdez,” when he assumed Lucinda’s assent to that not very pretty transaction, when he hinted at the luxury which would reward that assent, and so on. But the genuineness of his conflict, of his scruples on the one hand, of his passion on the other, made anger seem cruel, while the bluntness of his perception seemed to make it ridiculous. Perhaps on this latter point I exaggerated a little – asking from him an insight into the situation to which I was helped by a more intimate knowledge of the past and of the persons; but at all events he was, as I conceived, radically wrong in his estimate of the possibilities. At last I was impelled to tell him so.

It was very late; in disregard of his “Don’t go yet, I haven’t finished,” I had actually put on my coat, and taken my hat and stick in my hand. I stood like that, opposite to where he sat, and expounded my views to him. I imagine that to a cool spectator I should have looked rather absurd, for by now I too was somehow wrought up and excited; he had got me back into my pre-Paris state of mind, the one in which I had been when I intimated to Nina that I must hunt the Riviera for Lucinda and find out the truth about her at all costs. The Conference on Tonnage was routed, driven pell-mell out of my thoughts.

“You can’t buy Valdez,” I told him, “not in the sense that you mean. He’ll sell himself, body and soul, for money – to you, or me, or Nina, or all of us, or anybody else. But he won’t sell Lucinda. He sells himself for money, but it’s because of her that he must have the money – to dazzle her, to cut a figure in her eyes, to get her back to him. He used her to tempt you with, to make you shell out – just as he did, in another way, with Nina. But he knew he was safe; he knew he’d never have to deliver what he was pretending to sell. She’s not only the one woman to him, she’s the one idea in his head, the one stake he always plays for. He’d sell his soul for her, but he wouldn’t sell her in return for all you have. You sit here, balancing her against this and that – now against God, now against Mammon! He doesn’t set either of them for a moment in the scales against her.”

If what I said sharpened his perception, it blunted his scruples. The idea of Valdez’s passion was a spur to his own.

“Then it’s man against man,” he said in a sullen, dogged voice. “If I find I can’t buy her, I’ll take her.”

“You can try. If she lets you, she’s a changed woman. That’s all I can say. I need hardly add that I shall not offer you my assistance. Why, hang it, man, if she’s to be got, why shouldn’t I have a shot at her myself?”

He gave a short gruff laugh. “I don’t quite associate the idea with you, but of course you’d be within your rights, as far as I’m concerned.”

I laughed too. “There’s fair warning to you, then! And no bad blood, I hope? Also, perhaps, enough debate on what is, after all, rather a delicate subject – a lady’s honor – as some scrupulous people might remind us. By way of apology to the proprieties, I’ll just add that in my private opinion we should neither of us have the least chance of success. She may not be Valdez’s any more – as to that I express no opinion, though I have one – but I don’t believe she’ll be any one else’s.”

“What makes you say that?” he grumbled out surlily.

“She herself makes me say it; she herself and what I know about her. And, considering your condition, it seems common kindness to tell you my view, for what it’s worth. Now, my friend, thanks for your dinner, and – good-night!”

“Are you staying here – in Paris – much longer?”

“I shall be for a week – possibly a fortnight – I expect.”

“Then good-by as well as good-night; I shall go back to-morrow.”

“To Villa San Carlo?”

“No, I don’t know where I shall go. It depends.”

“To where you can test the value of my view, perhaps?” He had now risen, and I walked across to him, holding out my hand. He took it, with another gruff laugh.

“This sort of thing plays hell with a man; but there’s no need for us to quarrel, Julius?”

“Not at present, at all events. And it looks as if you had a big enough quarrel on your hands already.”

“Nina? Yes.” It was on that name, and not on the other, that at last we parted. And I suppose that he did “go back” the next day; for I saw him no more during the rest of my stay in Paris.

But a week later – our “labors” being “protracted” to that extent and longer – I had an encounter that gave me indirect news of him, as well as direct news of other members of the Rillington-cum-Dundrannan family. To my surprise, I met my cousin Waldo in the Rue de la Paix. Nina and he – and Eunice – were on their way home. In the first place, Sir Paget had written that Aunt Bertha was seedy and moping, and wondering when they would be back. In the second, Nina had got restless and tired of Mentone, while he himself was so much better that there was no longer any reason to stay there on his account.

“In fact, we got a bit bored with ourselves,” Waldo confessed as he took my arm and we walked along together, “after we lost you two fellows. Dull for the ladies. Oh, I know you couldn’t help yourself, old fellow; this job here was too big to miss. But we lost Godfrey too.” His voice fell to a confidential pitch, and he smiled slyly as he pressed my arm. “Well, you know, dear Nina is given to making her plans, bless her! And she’s none too pleased when they don’t come off, is she? I rather fancy that she had a little plan on at the Villa – Eunice Unthank, you know – and a nice girl she is – and that Godfrey didn’t feel like coming up to the scratch. So he tactfully had business at the works that kept him away from the Villa. Do you see what I mean?”

“Well, I suppose he was better away if he didn’t mean to play up. If he’d stayed, it might have put ideas in the girl’s head that – ”

“Exactly, old chap. Though we were awfully sorry he went, still that was the view Nina took about it. I think she was right.”

Facts had supplied a sufficient explanation of my disappearance from Villa San Carlo; here plainly was the official version of Godfrey’s. In order to cover a great defeat, Lady Dundrannan, with her usual admirable tactics, acknowledged a minor one. It was a quite sufficient explanation to offer to unsuspecting Waldo; and it was certainly true, so far as it went; the Eunice-Godfrey project had miscarried.

“I liked the girl and I’m sorry,” said Waldo. “But there’s lots of time, and of course, the world being what it is, he can always make a good marriage.” He laughed gently. “But I suppose women always like to manage a man’s future for him, if they can, don’t they?”

His ignorance of the great defeat was evidently entire; his wife had looked after that. But it was interesting to observe that – as a concomitant, perhaps, of his returning physical vigor – his mind gave hints of a new independence. He had not ceased to love and admire his wife – there was no reason why he ever should – but his smile at her foible was something new – since his marriage, I mean. The limit thus indicated to his Dundrannanization was welcome to me, a Rillington. What the smile pointed to was, the next moment, confirmed by the sigh with which he added, pursuing what was to him apparently the same train of thought, “Nina’s against our living at Cragsfoot when I succeed.”

“Well, if you will marry thumping heiresses, with half a dozen palaces of their own – ”

“Yes, I know, old man. Still – well, I can’t expect her to share my feeling about it, can I?” He smiled again, this time rather ruefully. “In fact, she’s pressing me to settle the matter now.”

“What do you mean? Sir Paget’s still alive! Is she asking for a promise, or what?”

“She wants me to sell my remainder – subject to my father’s life-interest. Nina likes things definitely settled, you see. She doesn’t like Cragsfoot.” To my considerable surprise, he accompanied these last words with a very definite wink. A smile, a sigh, a wink – yes, Waldo was recovering some independence of thought, if not of action. But in this affair it was his action that mattered, not his thoughts. Still, the fact remained that his wink was an unmistakable reference to the past – to Lucinda.

“Sir Paget wouldn’t like it, would he?” I suggested.

“No, I’m afraid not – not the idea of it, at first. But a man is told to cleave to his wife. After all, if I have a son to inherit it, he wouldn’t be Rillington of Cragsfoot, he’d be Dundrannan.”

“Of course he would. I’d forgotten. But does it make much difference?”

“And amongst all the rest of it, Cragsfoot wouldn’t be much more than an appendage. I love Nina, Julius, but I wish sometimes that she wasn’t quite so damned rich! Don’t think for an instant that she ever rams it down my throat. She never would.”

“My dear chap, I know her. I’m sure she’d be incapable of – ”

“But there the fact is. And it creates – well, a certain situation. I say, I’m not keeping you? My ladies are shopping, and I’ve an hour off, but if you – ”

“I’ve time to hear anything you want to say. And you’re not tired?”

“Strong as a horse now. I enjoy walking. Look here, old chap. Of course, there are lots of these ‘new rich,’ as the papers call them, who’d pay a long price for Cragsfoot, but – ”

“Thinking of anybody in particular?” I put in.

“Never mind!” He laughed – almost one of his old hearty laughs. “Well, yes. Have you ever had any reason – ? I mean, it’s funny you should ask that.”

“Something a certain friend of ours once let fall set me thinking.”

“Well, if that idea took shape, if Nina wanted it – ”

Perhaps in the end she wouldn’t! I was thinking that possibly the course of events might cause Lady Dundrannan not to wish to see her cousin – and his establishment – at Cragsfoot.

“If she did – and he did,” Waldo went on, “well, I should be in a tight corner. Because, of course, he could outbid practically everybody, if he chose – and what reason for objecting could I give?”

“You seem to have something in your mind. You’re looking – for you – quite crafty! Out with it!”

“Well, supposing I’d promised that, if I sold, I’d give you first offer?”

Waldo had delivered himself of his idea – and it seemed nothing less than a proposal to put a spoke in the wheel of his wife’s plans as he conceived them! Decidedly rebellion was abroad – open and covert! It worked mightily in Godfrey; it was working even in Waldo.

“I don’t like your selling,” I said. “You’re the chief – I’m a cadet. But if you’re forced – I beg your pardon, Waldo! If you decide” – he pressed my arm again, smiling at my correction, but saying nothing – “to go, there’s nothing I should like so much as to settle down there myself. But I can’t outbid – ”

“A man doesn’t ask his own kinsman more than a fair price, when the deal’s part of a family arrangement,” said Waldo. “May I speak to my father, and write you a proposal about it? And we’ll let the matter stand where it does till we know what he thinks and till you’ve had an opportunity of considering.”

“All right,” said I, and we walked on a little way in silence. Then I felt again the slight pressure on my arm. “Well, here’s where we’re staying. I promised to meet them at tea. Will you come in?”

I shook my head, murmuring something about business. He did not press the point. “We’re off again early to-morrow, and dining with some friends of Eunice’s to-night. See you again soon at Cragsfoot – we’re going to Briarmount. Good-by!”

But that was not quite his last word. He gave my arm a final squeeze; and he smiled again and again a little ruefully. “I rather think that, in his heart, the old pater would prefer what I’ve suggested even to our – to any other arrangement, Julius.”

It was quite as much as it was diplomatic to say about his father’s feelings on that point. Like the one which had been discussed by Godfrey and myself, it might be considered delicate.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE WINNING TICKET

THEN came the astonishing turn of fortune’s wheel – that is almost fact, scarcely metaphor – which seemed to transform the whole situation. It came to my knowledge on the very day on which those protracted labors of ours reached a conclusion at last.

We had had a long and tedious final session – for this time there was not only business to wind up, but compliments to be exchanged too – and I came out of it at half-past six in the evening so exhausted that I turned into the nearest café at which I was known, and procured a whisky-and-soda. With it the waiter brought me a copy of Le Soir, and, as I sipped my “refresher” and smoked a cigar, I glanced through it, hoping (to be candid) to find some complimentary notice of the achievements of my Conference. I did not find that – perhaps it was too soon to expect it – but I did find something which interested me a great deal more. Among the miscellaneous items of “intelligence” I read the following:

“The first prize in yesterday’s draw of the Reparation Lottery Loan has been won by M. Arsenio Valdez of Nice. The amount of the prize is three million francs. The number of the winning ticket was two hundred and twelve thousand, one hundred and twenty-one. We understand that the fortunate winner purchased it for a trifling sum from a chance acquaintance at Monte Carlo.”

I re-read the winning number; indeed, I took my pencil out of my pocket and wrote it down – in figures – on the margin of the newspaper. I believe that I said softly, “Well, I’m damned!” The astonishing creature had brought it off at last, and brought it off to some tune. Three million francs! Pretty good – for anybody except the Frosts of this world, of course!

Aye, Arsenio would buy that ticket from a chance acquaintance (probably one of the same kidney as himself) if he had the coin, or could beg, borrow, or steal it! Number 212, 121! There it was three times over – 21 – 21 – 21. He would have seemed to himself absolutely mad if he had let that ticket escape him, when chance threw it in his way. It was, indeed, as though Fortune said, “I have teased you long enough, O faithful votary, but I give myself to you at last!” And she had – she actually had. Arsenio’s long quest was accomplished.

What would he do with it, I pondered, as I puffed and sipped. I saw him resplendent again as he had been on that never forgotten Twenty-first, and smiling in monkeyish triumph over all of us who had mocked him for a fool. I even saw him paying back Nina and Godfrey Frost, though possibly this was a detail which might be omitted, as being a distasteful reminder of his days of poverty. I saw him dazzling Lucinda with something picturesquely extravagant, a pearl necklace or a carpet of banknotes – what you will in that line. I heard him saying to her, “Number twenty-one! Always twenty-one. Your number, Lucinda!” And I saw her flushing like a girl just out of the schoolroom, as Godfrey had seen her flush at Nice.

Ah, Godfrey Frost! This event was – to put the thing vulgarly – one in the eye for him, wasn’t it? He had lost his pull; his lever failed him. He could no longer pose, either to himself or to anybody else, as the chivalrous reliever of distress, the indignant friend to starving beauty. And Nina’s gracious, though sadly unappreciated, bounty to a fallen rival – that went by the board too.

These things were to the good; but at the back of my mind there lurked a discontent, even a revolt. Godfrey had proposed to buy Valdez; to buy Lucinda from Valdez, he had meant. Now Arsenio himself would buy her with his winning ticket, coating the transaction with such veneer of romance as might still lie in magic Twenty-one, thrice repeated. One could trust him to make the most of that, skillfully to eke it out to cover the surface as completely as possible. Would it be enough? His hope lay in what that flush represented, the memories it meant, that feeling in her which she herself, long ago, had declared to be hers because she was a primitive woman.

I did not, I fear, pay much attention to the speeches – though I made one of them – at the farewell dinner of our Conference that night; and next day, my first free day, was still filled with the thought of Arsenio and his three million francs; my mind, vacant now of pressing preoccupations, fell a prey to recollections, fancies, images. A restlessness took possession of me; I could not stay in Paris. I was entitled to a holiday; where should I pass it? I did not want to go to Cragsfoot; I had had enough of the Riviera. (There was possibly a common element, ungallant towards a certain lady and therefore not explicitly confessed to myself, in my reluctance to turn my steps in either of those directions.) Where should I go? Something within me answered – Venice!

Why not? Always a pleasant place for a holiday in times of peace; and one read that “peace conditions” were returning; the pictures, and so on, were returning too, or being dug up, or taken out of their sandbags. And the place was reported to be quite gay. Decidedly my holiday should be passed at Venice.

Quite so! And a sporting gamble on my knowledge of Arsenio, of his picturesque instinct, his eye for a situation! As a minor attraction, there were the needy aristocrats, his father’s old set, whom he had been wont to “touch” in days of adversity; it would be fine to flaunt his money in their eyes; they would not sniff, Frost-like, at three million francs. Here I felt even confident that he would speak gracefully of repayment, though with care not to wound Castilian pride by pressing the suggestion unduly. But the great thing would be the association, the memory, the two floors at the top of the palazzo. Surely she would go there with him if she would go anywhere? Surely there, if anywhere, she would come back to him? That, beyond all others, was the place to offer the pearl necklace, to spread the carpet of bank notes. If the two were to be found anywhere in the world together, it would be at Venice, at the palazzo.

So to Venice I went – on an errand never defined to myself, urged by an impulse, a curiosity, a longing, to which many things in the past united to give force, which the present position sharpened. “I must know; I must see for myself.” That feeling, which had made me unable to rest at Villa San Carlo, now drove me to Venice. Putting money in my pocket and giving my Paris bankers the name of my hotel, I set out, on a road the end of which I could not see, but which I was determined to tread, if I could, and to explore.